Blood Orange

Since 2011 · United Kingdom

Devonté Hynes grew up in Ilford, east London, and arrived first as a teenager in the dance-punk band Test Icicles before recasting himself as the orchestral folk act Lightspeed Champion. Their story

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Negro Swan (2018)

Negro Swan builds its songs out of quiet -- muted guitar figures, half-buried drum machines, and Devonté Hynes's voice sitting so low in the mix it often reads as an aside. "Charcoal Baby" is the album at its most direct, a clean guitar hook carrying a lyric about visibility and what it costs. Janet Mock's spoken interludes run through the record, framing it less as a song cycle than as a conversation about Black and queer interiority. The result is Hynes's warmest and most vulnerable album, built almost entirely out of restraint.

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Blood Orange

Negro Swan · 2018

Devonté Hynes grew up in Ilford, east London, and arrived first as a teenager in the dance-punk band Test Icicles before recasting himself as the orchestral folk act Lightspeed Champion. Blood Orange, begun in 2011 after he moved to New York, is the project where those reversals finally cohered — a producer's sensibility applied to soft-focus soul, with Hynes writing, playing and assembling most of the music himself while rotating guest vocalists through the frame. He has been explicit that the model for that structure is Massive Attack, one author and many voices, rather than any solo artist.

His stated influences run through British guitar music rather than the R&B lineage his sound is usually filed beside: the Smiths, Radiohead, New Order and Prefab Sprout, with Morrissey singled out for the bluntness of his lines. Freetown Sound (2016) and Negro Swan (2018) turned that inheritance toward questions of Black and queer identity, using spoken-word interludes and collage in place of conventional song structure. Alongside Blood Orange he has become one of the most sought-after writers and producers of his generation, though he keeps that work deliberately separate from the records released under his own project.